Automated 4-Stage Email Follow-Up System with AI Personalization and Database Tracking

This n8n template demonstrates how to automate personalized cold email follow-ups using AI personalization and database tracking. Perfect for sales teams, recruiters, and agencies managing high-volume outreach.

Use cases: Follow up with cold leads, re-engage trial users, nurture conference contacts, recruit candidates, or follow up with proposal recipients.

PS: 1) This was created as a Follow Up workflow it was not meant for inital outreach. (However if you can customize it to include initial outreach then go ahead)

2)This workflow sends a maximum of 4 follow Ups

How it works

NocoDB fetches all leads and filters those needing follow-up today based on the "Next Follow up/Contact" date A switch node routes leads to the appropriate follow-up stage (1-4) based on which follow-ups have already been sent AI personalizes each email template by inserting the recipient's name while keeping the rest of the content intact Emails are sent via SMTP (or Gmail node), then the database updates to mark the follow-up as sent and schedule the next one The workflow runs daily at 10 AM to automatically process follow-ups without manual intervention

Good to know

Each AI personalization costs ~$0.001 with Groq (free tier available). See Groq pricing for details. Follow-up schedule: Day 3, 7, 12, 16 after initial contact (fully customizable) Leads marked "Not Interested" are automatically excluded from future follow-ups The workflow only processes leads with an "Initial Contact Date" set - this triggers the entire sequence (The initial Contact is done manually and updated manually)

How to use

The schedule trigger runs daily but can be replaced with manual trigger or webhook for immediate testing Customize the 4 email templates in the AI nodes to match your brand voice and offering Adjust follow-up intervals by modifying the "Update a row" nodes (currently +4 or +5 days between follow-ups) Import your lead list to NocoDB with minimum required fields: first_name, last_name, email, Initial Contact Date

Requirements

NocoDB account** - Free lead database (You can use any database-Google Sheets, Airtable etc. However ensure the essential details below are in the database) Groq API key** (or OpenAI/Ollama) - For AI personalization (Swap this for any LLM you like/have) SWITCH* the 'Send Email' nodes for the Gmail* Node and set it up using OAuth